I was intrigued by a recent article in the Daily Princetonian written by a junior philosophy major, Ryan Born. It was an argument against free speech — at least for conservatives. It was a reflection on what is wrong on university campuses today.
Now I don’t know the young man who wrote the article, and I am sure he is sincere and a good student, but it is his ideas that I have trouble with, especially in today’s current politically correct climate. A climate that says some conservative views, whether on religion or politics, have no business being heard.
“I am not arguing that conservatives do not expect intellectual opposition to their content; instead, I am arguing against their right to be heard and accepted,” wrote our student philosopher.
“Conservatives would have you believe that their insistence on free speech is related to a desire for intellectual diversity and openness or discussion. When conservatives appeal to ‘free speech,’ it is actually a calculated political move, designed to open up avenues of political discourse while shaming others from moving in active political opposition. I argue that when conservatives resort to this move, they can be safely ignored, as they are appealing to a right that does not exist. In my belief, when conservative ideas are opposed, there is no right that is being infringed,” he wrote.
Of course this shouldn’t come as a surprise to many. All too often we see conservative speakers on college campuses either being interrupted and shouted down, or their invitations to speak withdrawn by college administrators.
Fears of violent protest against conservative speakers have caused some colleges to charge unreasonably high rental fees from sponsoring organizations to cover “security costs,” others cancel speakers due to the fear that overly sensitive students will face some psychological harm if exposed to some nefarious idea from the political or religious right.
Case in point is a recent withdrawal of school sponsorship of a debate on the pros and cons of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and President Trump’s plan to rescind it, pending congressional action.
The law school at Seattle University had agreed to sponsor the event in conjunction with the student chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative/libertarian legal group. The program was to have been conducted as part of the school’s Social Justice Mondays series which had sponsored such programs as “Refugee Roundtable” and “Reproductive Justice.”
According to the website The College Fix, the law school’s Direct Action Committee organized an online petition to cancel the event. The petition read:
“We refuse to sit by and let hateful xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric be a part of the culture/message/speech of Seattle University School of Law and Seattle University as a whole. We demand the school act on behalf of its undocumented students, and instead of cosponsoring programming which is harmful to them, they should foster an environment which is safe for them and for everyone else on campus.”
It worked. Dean Annette Clark withdrew the school’s sponsorship saying that Mr. Trump has “generated great fear within vulnerable immigrant communities and has caused real harm, making discussions of immigration policy that include a conservative viewpoint even more painful and anxiety- and anger-producing for those individuals and families who are at risk (and for their allies).”
While the program was allowed to continue under the sole sponsorship of the Federalist Society, the dean scheduled an alternative pro-DACA event. That the pro-DACA program was acceptable, but a pro/con debate — for law students, of all people — apparently was not, is only one example of how thought control and free speech are handled on many of today’s colleges.
“I fail to see the basis for the withdrawal of the sponsorship as well as the apology by [Dean] Clark for holding a balanced debate on an issue [with] great national importance,” said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, adding: “The debate reflects precisely the mission of higher education to encourage debates on issues that divide our country,” according to The College Fix.
Another example which flew under the radar was reported at See Thru EDU, a publication of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. In September the academic journal Third World Quarterly published an essay by Professor Bruce Gilley of Portland State University, entitled “The Case for Colonialism.”
Shortly after the article was published over 16,000 college professors signed a petition demanding that the article be retracted, and it was.
According to See Thru EDU’s George Leef, “The scholars who signed the petitions were not disagreeing with Gilley. They were demanding that he be silenced. They also wanted apologies from both [Gilley] and the journal. Just as totalitarian regimes of the last century insisted that dissidents acknowledge their errors before being sent off to ‘re-education’ camps, so do our contemporary progressives insist that people who say or write ‘offensive’ things bow down before them.”
He closed by stating, “Shouting speakers down and demanding retraction of ‘incorrect’ writings are the hallmarks of authoritarianism. It is deeply disturbing to see how far it has spread into our higher education system.”
In Wisconsin the Board of Regents recently voted for a new policy that imposes punishments ranging from suspension to expulsion for students who violate free speech rights on campus. One regent who opposed the policy objected to the language that a student “alleged to have engaged in violent or other disorderly misconduct that materially and substantially disrupted the free expression of others” could face discipline.
Campus Reform reports that Regent Tony Evers claimed the new policy, which targets activities used to close debate, will chill speech on campuses. “Proponents of this anti-free speech legislation argue liberal biases have overwhelmed our college campuses, but then cannot provide one single example of a conservative speaker being unable to complete their remarks at any college or university in Wisconsin,” Evers is reported to have said.
The Economist reported last year that there is a growing belief by many that people and groups have a right not to be offended. It cites, as an example, an action taken by the University of California saying that calling “America a land of opportunity” is a “racist micro-aggression” since it could be interpreted that those who do not succeed have only themselves to blame.
Are we starting to understand now how our Princeton philosopher comes by his understanding of free speech? And what cost is it to the mission of the university?
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has found that a majority of students now self-censor their classroom comments, support disinviting campus speakers who hold beliefs with which they disagree, and do not know that hate speech is largely protected by the First Amendment.
“[Fifty-eight] percent of college student think it’s important to be part of a campus community where they are not exposed to intolerant or offensive ideas,” FIRE reports. “In class, 30 percent of students have self-censored because they thought their words would be offensive….Very liberal students are 14 percentage points more likely than their very conservative peers to feel comfortable expressing their opinions in the classroom.”
“There is clearly a partisan divide in how students perceive free speech on college campuses,” said FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley. “This further solidifies the importance of FIRE’s mission. Free expression is too important to become a partisan issue in higher education.”
The well-known Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, agrees. He told Fox Business News, “Classrooms have become propaganda vehicles where captive audiences of students are told not how to think but what to think, particularly about sensitive issues like the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, gay rights, Black Lives Matter, and they are graded on what they think, rather than how they think.”
The issue is so prevalent that the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has opened a new website as a resource for students facing attacks on their speech rights. ADF Senior Counsel Casey Mattox, director of the Center for Academic Freedom, said:
“Today’s college students are tomorrow’s judges, legislators, teachers, and voters. Yet public universities are not only failing to educate the next generation about their First Amendment freedoms, they are actively violating those rights and teaching the next generation that freedom of speech is too dangerous to permit.”
We’ve come a long way from the 1965 Supreme Court decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District allowing students to wear black armbands in school to protest the Vietnam War, and the 1969 Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio allowing the Ku Klux Klan to rally, to now where “safe spaces” are common and students at Kellogg Community College in Michigan can be arrested for handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution and To Kill a Mockingbird can be banned from classroom discussion in a Mississippi school district.
The danger, of course, is that free speech is the bedrock for all of our freedoms: Press, religion, assembly, petition; without it our democracy will wane and so will freedom of thought, for if you can control speech you can control thought. “Newspeak” taught us that, but unfortunately we are coming to the point where our institutions dedicated to training our future leaders have missed the thrust of Orwell’s message.

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A Connecticut high school student may have to decide whether to remove a Planned Parenthood sticker on her laptop or leave her Catholic school after administrators told her to remove it, her parents said. Sophomore Kate Murray’s parents told the Greenwich Time that…Continue Reading

February 8, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The Bible’s condemnation of homosexual acts should be taken in “context” with Biblical times, Jesuit Father James Martin toldGeorgetown University students recently. Martin said as well that Catholics who support gay “marriage” should have no problem…Continue Reading

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Just three Democrats in the U.S. Senate supported a bill on Monday that would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks when unborn babies are capable of feeling pain. The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which has strong public support from Republicans…Continue Reading

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As Katholisch.de, the official website of the German bishops, reports today, Cardinal Willem Eijk, the Dutch cardinal and Metropolitan Archbishop of Utrecht, requested that Pope Francis bring light into the confusion concerning the question as to how to deal with…Continue Reading

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By DON FIER (Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and Founder of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wis., graciously took time out of his busy schedule to grant The Wanderer a wide-ranging interview during a recent visit to the Shrine. Included among the topics…Continue Reading

By RAYMOND LEO CARDINAL BURKE (Editor’s Note: His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke delivered the address below at the 32nd Annual Church Teaches Forum, “The Message of Fatima: Peace for the World,” Galt House, Louisville, Ky., July 22, 2017. The address is reprinted here with the kind permission of Cardinal Burke. All rights reserved. This is part one of the…Continue Reading

Catechism

Today . . .

There’s nothing, it seems, that the abortion chain Planned Parenthood won’t sue over. On Thursday, affiliates of the abortion chain in seven states sued the Trump administration for cutting funding for their questionable teen pregnancy prevention programs. The Daily Nonpareil reports the lawsuits argue that the Trump administration wrongly cut their funding prematurely and without cause. Nine groups, including Planned Parenthood affiliates in Washington, Iowa, North Carolina, South C

CAMBRIDGE, England, February 15, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A respected Catholic historian and philosopher challenged Cardinal Blase Cupich during a lecture last week about Pope’ Francis so-called “revolution of mercy” that has caused what many are defending as a “paradigm shift” in Catholic practice. Professor John Rist, after listening to a February 9 lecture at Cambridge Universityin which Cardinal Cupich praised Pope Francis’ “paradigm shift” in Catholic practice, asked the Cardinal at the end of the lect

VIENNA, Austria, February 14, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Austria’s bishops, led by Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, are indignant over a retired bishop’s passionate defense of Catholic teaching in opposing Church “blessings” for homosexual unions. After Bishop Andreas Laun, the retired Auxiliary Bishop of Salzburg, Austria, published Monday his strong rebuke of the German bishops for proposing to bless homosexual couples, there has been an inten

Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago is all for clarity. It has been a consistent theme, as when in September of 2017 he issued a decree banning guns in all parishes, schools and other facilities across the archdiocese “so there would be absolute clarity on our position.” His official statement put “clarity” in italics. When he was bishop of Rapid City, he called for “civility and clarity” in discussing legislation that would limit abortion, but he…Continue Reading

BEIJING — A group of influential Catholics published an open letter Monday express their shock and disappointment at report that the Vatican could soon reach a deal with the Chinese government, warning that it could create a schism in the church in China. The Holy See has been in negotiations for several years with the Chinese Communist Party and is now belie

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Within a week of taking office on January 23, 2017, President Trump reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, now called the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance, which bans U.S. funding for abortions overseas. The expanded policy prohibits $9 billion in U.S. taxpayer money from funding foreign organizations that perform or…Continue Reading

By HANNAH BROCKHAUS VATICAN CITY (CNA/EWTN News) — The Congregation for the Causes of Saints has approved the second miracle needed for the canonization of Blessed Pope Paul VI, allowing his canonization to take place, possibly later this year. According to Vatican Insider, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints approved the miracle by a…Continue Reading

By STEPHEN M. KRASON (Editor’s Note: Stephen M. Krason’s Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic column appears monthly [sometimes bimonthly] in Crisis. He is professor of political science and legal studies and associate director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He is also cofounder and president of…Continue Reading

By LISA BOURNE (Editor’s Note: LifeSiteNews ran this story on February 5.) + + + A Catholic priest is calling on bishops to excommunicate the 14 Catholic-identifying U.S. senators who voted two weeks ago against banning late-term abortions. He is also calling on priests to deny the Catholic pro-abortion senators Holy Communion. “Today is the…Continue Reading

By JAMES LIKOUDIS The centuries-old theological debate concerning the existence of Limbo for unbaptized babies (the limbo puerorum as a state of natural happiness) led to the 2007 publication of the document The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized by the International Theological Commission (ITC). The commission concluded there are “serious…Continue Reading

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Our Catholic Faith (Section B of print edition)

By DON FIER For a variety of reasons (a defect of consent, a diriment impediment, or a defect of the required form), many supposed modern-day marriages entered into by Catholic persons are invalid from their origin in the eyes of God and the Church. However, as we saw last week, depending on the circumstances, the Church has procedures by which…Continue Reading

Q. Concerning what our Blessed Mother said in Fatima about the rosary, I am confused as to whether or not she meant us to meditate on the mysteries while we are praying the Hail Marys or whether she meant us to meditate on the mysteries right before we say the Hail Marys. The consensus seems to be that we are…Continue Reading

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By ANDREA GAGLIARDUCCI (Wanderer Editor’s Note: Catholic News Agency on February 3 published a commentary concerning a 1989 Vatican response to dissent against Humanae Vitae. Below is an excerpted version of that commentary. Following that, we reprint the full text of the 1989 Vatican response, which, as the CNA commentary explains, is now available on the Vatican’s website. Please also…Continue Reading

By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK A joke sometimes recounted among clergy goes along these lines: Someone greets a wise old priest by asking, “What’s new?”, and he responds, sagely, “Christ is risen!” The humor here is less about what’s new than about the fact that everything, other than the only true revolution of Christ’s Incarnation and triumph over death, is…Continue Reading

By CAROLE BRESLIN Great sinners make great saints. It takes a strong-willed child to become a saint. These are statements which would easily fit saints such as Mary Magdalene and St. Augustine. In the thirteenth century, a young lady free in spirit and strong in will led such a life that she was essentially driven from her home village, but…Continue Reading

By CAROLE BRESLIN In the lives of the saints one thing is very common: They have such a strong desire to do God’s will that nothing will hinder their work. Many saints, despite illness, weak health, or many other obstacles achieved their goals. Frequently the amount of work accomplished by such individuals seems humanly impossible — and, of course, it…Continue Reading